Pritzker's Recovery Plan: Fire Workers

Boston uprising spreads to Chicago

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Believing hospitality companies are using the shaky economy as an excuse to further squeeze workers and eliminate jobs, hundreds of hospitality workers rallied outside the Park Hyatt Hotel on Thursday afternoon.

Pritzker - the local civic maven who is also a big-time donor to the Democratic Party and served as the national finance chair of Barack Obama's 2008 campaign - is on the board of Hyatt, which is owned by her family.

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And she's got a lot to answer for: Hyatt just fired nearly 100 housekeepers in Boston and outsourced their work to a company in Georgia.

“The difficult decision to outsource the housekeeping function at our Boston properties was made in response to the unprecedented economic challenges those hotels are facing in the current business environment,” Hyatt said in a statement. “A precipitous drop in revenues at our Boston hotels has made major cost-cutting measures necessary.”

Over the weekend, Hyatt offered new jobs to the employees it fired at their old wages, but it wasn't clear just how that would work, seeing as how the chain has already hired replacements for the housekeepers' old jobs.

The new jobs also appear to be only guaranteed for a year.

“Hyatt’s latest proposal is simply a smoke screen designed to trick people in to thinking Hyatt is doing the right thing,’’ union president Janice Loux said in a statement.

The fired housekeepers are non-union but their cause has been taken up by organized labor, which may see an opening to organize a hotel chain run by Democrats who are supposed to be on their side.

In the end, the housekeepers could take up their cause with the President's Economic Advisory Board. After all, Penny Pritzker is a member.